Misplacement, impermanence, a constant need for intercultural dialogue, and a longing for belonging. These are some conditions immigrating artists experience while in transit in so-called “Canada”. Join interdisciplinary artists Faune Ybarra and Josema Zamorano in a conversation about how their work is informed by an identity that never seems to settle. Talk moderated by Miret Rodríguez.

This event is free but registration is required. Please use the following link to save your spot:

https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/art-and-identity-in-transit-a-conversation-between-faune-ybarra-and-josema-tickets-721735027897

Date: Saturday, September 23
Time: 11:00 – 12:30 pm
Venue: SFU Vancouver Campus, HC 2270 Sauder Industries Policy Room – 515 West Hastings Street, Vancouver

In Partnership with the Consulate General of Mexico in Vancouver and with the support of Simon Fraser University.

Short Bios

Faune Ybarra (She/They)

Currently situated in the territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tseil-Waututh nations, Faune Ybarra is a diasporic artist/art worker, researcher and educator from Oaxaca and Mexico City. Current repositories of their work take the shape of “diasporic gestures”, weaving practices, and arts programming for BIPOC Emerging Artists. Ybarra has developed, performed, exhibited, and spoken about her work across so-called Canada including Eastern Edge Gallery (St. John’s), Capture Photo Fest (Vancouver), The Rooms Provincial Art Gallery (St. John’s), Contemporary Art Gallery (Vancouver) and Diasporic Futurisms (Toronto).

IG: @faunestanaccount | Website: https://www.faune-ybarra.online/

Josema Zamorano is an Interdisciplinary visual artist and educator, native of Nayarit Mexico. He is interested in a critique of the modern ways of seeing and constructing reality: the camera, the image, the detached observer of the world, the method, the concretion of languages. His practice often leans to experimental-performative processes of making and interactive reception. He explores how the movement of eyes, body, and comprehension, in a changing world, transform and connect appearances and meanings. At university he develops with students a critique of the self-attributed western primacy of propositional languages and pre-figured methods over ancestral or current praxis-based/art-based/land-based relational ways of know-ing and be-ing in the world.

Zamorano worked as a telecommunications engineer before making a turn to the arts. He had an early love for magic which later developed in studies on the science of invisible-electromagnetic signals and waves. Poetry spoiled his promising engineering carrier and he came back to university to study existential philosophy, poetry, the stories of ancestral Mesoamerican culture, and visual arts. The most transformational part of his education has been passing through Mexico’s National University (UNAM) while re-doing undergraduate and M.A. studies at the time of widespread university activism in support of the Maya-Zapatista-movement calls for national Indigenous rights in Mexico. At UNAM he was a student of the renown proponent of poetry as knowledge, poet and philosopher Ramon Xirau, and the mystic poet Elsa Cross. He has also earned an MSc on satellite communications at University of Surrey (UK) and a PhD in Interdisciplinary Studies (University of British Columbia). For over twenty years he has taught a variety of topics, from electrical-circuits design and philosophy of technology, to critical inquiry, art-based research, interdisciplinary studies, photography, and Spanish. He is currently a faculty at Capilano University.

Facilitated by Miret Rodriguez

Miret Rodriguez is the creative director of Curated Tastes and is the former VP of VLACC. She holds a MBA in art and culture management from the Superior School of Commerce in Paris and a BA Major in Art History from UBC. Miret relies on art and the artists that make it to navigate through cultural dislocation and hybridity. Since 2020 Miret has been interviewing Latinx artists in Canada about their immigration stories and their ways of expressing their experiences through art. This led her into curating Volver (to return, to become) in 2022 at Cityscape Community Artspace in North Vancouver.

In Partnership with the Consulate General of Mexico in Vancouver and with the support of Simon Fraser University.